My life has never been filled with so much blessed mayhem. Where do I begin. I suppose I’ll start at the beginning.
On Febuary 25, my little daughter Katherine was born. You’d think after three children it would become old-hat but nope, she still melts my heart. This has been the best delivery we’ve had yet! Manda’s incision is healing incredibaly well (we have had to have c-sections with all our kids.) and Kate is a wonderful baby (she eats well and only crys when something is actually wrong.) Now your probably thinking “where’s the mayhem in that?”. Well in this case the storm came after the calm… litteraly.
We came home on Friday to our excited children, eager to show them their new baby sister, and had a fun evening spending time as a family and sharing our stories of what we did over the past couple days. The next morning we had to take Kate to go to get a test done. I had asked Kristin, a coworker of mine, to babysit the children for us. As we drove to Warner Robins we hit some rain. No big deal, I’d noticed it was in the forcast. Well we went to do the test and while filling out the paperwork I got a call from Kristin. She’s at our neighbors house with the kids… (strange) because a tree fell on our house, demolished the back pourch and punched a hole in the roof above the kids room… (awesome). Come to find out, that storm we drove through spawned a tornado and the winds coming off of it blew over the two-thirds-rotten pecan tree that lumbers over our house in the back yard. Fun. They also told us that there was an inch of rain in our kitchen and more was on the way.
When I got to the scene the fire department was there finishing up tarping the roof off. They told me that the house was uninhabitable now and we couldn’t live there till repairs were made.
Now, this is where the blessing comes in. The nice thing about living in the country is that just about the whole fire department consisted of members of my church. They put out a message on the chaincall saying I needed help and that they would start work in two hours. I left to look at a trailor one of the brothers offered to let us have and then went to check on Amanda and the kids (i’d left them at our neighbors house.). After two houres came and went, I decided to return to the scene to see if anyone was there. I was shocked to find pretty much the whole church there clearing debri and loading my furnature and belongings into their trailors and trucks. I tried to help but ended up just guiding traffic. Maybe an hour and a half later I went to the new house to help unload to find that the women had cleaned the house from top to bottom and had actually started unloading the first trailor. Wow. In about five or six hours time they moved my entire house to another location. And I’m not just talking boxes on the floor, oh no. I’m talking dishes washed and in the cupboards, pictures on the walls, curtainrods hung up, food in the fridge, beds asembled and made, tools put in the shed, windows washed, floors swept, and lots of other things to boot! Now, I still have a lot to do mine you, but it would have taken
Me two solid weeks to do what they did on six hours. What a blessing. This is part of what a real brotherhood is all about.
If any of you guys are reading this, I love you… really. Maybe you could say that “the way to a man’s heart is through recovering him from his disaster”
I really don’t know what I would have done since Manda is still healing and not able to take care of her stuff.
God, if your reading this too, thanks, I love you too.

Oh I forgot about the pictures! Here they are.

NoMachine Logo

I recently stumbled across a fantastic tool for remotely accessing Linux boxes. It’s called NX from NoMachine. Now I know there are a lot of remote admin options out there today but where NoMachine really shines is in it’s speed. It’s superfast. It also pipes it all through SSH so you get some security to boot. I was shocked at how snappy the interface of my server was over my home LAN. It’s pretty fast over the net too. The lag that it does have makes it feel more like a VM then VNC. There is support for other protocols (VNC, RDP, etc..) beside XDMCP so you can use their security features and speed with existing infrastructure. Thats a plus for guys like me who don’t like redoing things that are well and good already. I like that you can disconnect from a session and keep it running to reattach to it later, kinda like Screen for GUI’s.

Now I’ve only been playing with it for about four or five days so I’m sure I’ll find some good/bad things about it through use. I also plan on checking out some of their tools for web deployment, and such. It looks like they got some pretty good eggheads on their staff.

As far as pricing is concerned, it does cost quite a bit for the beefier versions but they provide a free version that allows two simultanious connections, which for SOHO use is good enough. One thing to note, though it is in the works, there is no Windows server support. Only Linux/Solaris servers will be able to host sessions. This was kind of a bummer cause I was wanting to use it at work but hey, it’s in the works.

Anyway, check it out and leave a comment to tell me what you think.

~John

I am a Linux user and humbly please by the fact. Here’s my story.

I, like many others, have been using computers since I was a wee lad. I’ve spent many hours leaning over the shoulder of my older brother, a computer guru, asking “What’s that? What’s that? What’s that?”. God, bless him for his patience. I’ve experienced everything from Commodore 64’s to 8088’s but when Windows 95 came out, it was my operating system of choice. Then when 2000 Pro came out I was wowed even further. A sad side of this story is that in those immature days I got involved in quite a bit of software piracy. (Please don’t prosecute me) If you could download it, I had it. It wasn’t uncommon among my friends either so I really didn’t think much of it.

I have been a Christian since I was about 15 but really started following Jesus Christ when I was about 20. Around this time I was living on my own, poor, and eager to learn. God really convicted me about pirating software and how it is stealing. Now, for those of you who say that the system is messed up and music should be downloadable for free and all that jazz about piracy being good marketing and la dee da, I agree that the system is messed up. But, I have read in the Bible that God wants to obey the laws of the land and this would be included. So I stopped pirating software. I wiped my hard drive clean of all the stolen loot. So there I was, guilt free but also software free. I didn’t have an XP license to use because I was so poor. One of my friends gave me the XP lisence from his new Dell (He preferred 2000 Pro) to have. I thought, great now I can use my computer again! Wrong. Come to find out it was an OEM license, licensed to that specific processor. This was my introduction to the brokenness of EULA’s. My brother (the guru) was the one who informed me about this fact. I was very disheartened. Here I was trying to do the right thing and it all seemed to be so limiting. I hated it. Then he said “Why don’t you try Linux”. “What’s that?” “It’s an OS that’s free to use.” “Is it any good?” “Yeah, it’s pretty good.”

So I delved into the realm of Linux. I started with Mandriva (don’t remember the version) and proceeded to download every package I that could find, probably some leftover pirate mentality. I ended up with a bloated OS that I could hardly use. So I canned it and tried Ubuntu (“I’ve heard good things about Ubuntu” my brother said) I installed it on my very first laptop. A Dell C600. I’ve been using Ubuntu Linux since Edgy Eft came out. And I gotta say, I’m very happy with it. It’s really come a long way and I no longer have to worry about licenses for OS’s OR software. It really is a great feeling of freedom. Not that I’m trying to be rebellious, or trying to stick it to the man, or something. It’s a weight off my mind. Worrying about those things used to be needed. Now I don’t need to worry about them anymore (Except when I’m at work. Eek!)

So, there you have it. How I became an Ubuntero. And I have no intentions of going back.

~John

I’ve tried blogging in the past but it never really stuck, the posts were immature, and it just plain stank… but now I’m turning over a new leaf. Well actually turning over an old leaf to it’s not so brown side. We’ll see how this take goes. I hope I’ll have something enlightening and challenging for you to read as I’m really going to try to make this a not-pointless-ranting-and-stupid-videos blog. I’m not as good a blogger as my wife so please pray for me.

~John